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Professional retouchers earn their livings altering portraits in Adobe Photoshop to make individuals appear thinner, taller, possessed of flawless skin and perfect teeth. The images in fashion photography and celebrity portraiture routinely undergo these and other manipulations, turning people who start out attractive into epitomes of standards not always realistic. When you need to remodel a person's appearance and remove a few pounds, use Photoshop's resizing options, filters and cloning tools to achieve your objectives.

Disproportionate Scaling

With the introduction of content-aware scaling, Adobe Photoshop made it possible to scale images disproportionately without distorting the shape and proportions of significant elements within a photograph, including people and buildings. To make a human subject appear thinner, however, you need the program's old-fashioned scaling methods. The Image Size dialog box includes a check box that disables proportionate scaling so you can change image dimensions independently of one another. Turn on the Preview check box so you can monitor your work, and reduce the image width value. How much you narrow the image depends on its size and resolution, and your taste. A Free Transform operation -- Ctrl-T -- enables you to alter width or height interactively or to enter numeric options for size and scale. Push in on the handles at the midpoints of the bounding box that appears around your image content to narrow it. Press "Enter" to finalize the transformation.

Liquify Filter

The Liquify filter has become a mainstay of retouchers, used to precisely reshape legs, torsos, facial features and hair often with just subtle nudges. If you compare an image's appearance as it enters the Liquify filter interface to the poked and prodded result that emerges from it in the hands of a high-fashion image workflow, you quickly see how celebrity photos gain a bodily perfection that even personal trainers and special diets can't accomplish. To experiment with Liquify, open the "Filter" menu and choose "Liquify." Use the Forward Warp tool to move pixels in the direction you push with your cursor. The Freeze tool enables you to protect image areas from alteration. If you go too far, use the Reconstruct tools to restore parts of the original appearance of the image or layer. Work on a duplicate of your main image layer to give yourself a fallback position and a means of comparing your results with the original.

Spot Retouching

To adjust a small-scale element of an individual's appearance, you can rely on subtle adjustments made with the tools you use in the main Photoshop interface. After you use the Pen tool to draw an altered, narrower outline of some portion of the subject's anatomy, you can transform that path into a selection that protects the area you want to retain or defines the area you want to retouch. Click on your path in the Paths panel and use the "Make Selection" command in the fly-out menu of the panel to turn the area defined by the path into an active selection. With the selection active, press "Shift-Ctrl-I" to invert it so you can use Photoshop's Stamp and Healing tools to remove the area outside it, covering parts of the subject's thigh or upper arm with the color of the background behind the individual. Invert the selection again and use Photoshop's Dodge and Burn tools to re-contour the altered anatomy with highlights and shadows that define the shape of a limb or torso.

Concealment

Some quick-and-dirty retouching projects don't leave time for small refinements and incremental adjustments. In those cases, you may be able to reduce the apparent dimensions of your image subject by concealing parts of the subject's anatomy. If the person's physique includes one problem area, you can crop the image so that area doesn't show. In another instance, you may use the Clone Stamp to extend a jacket, obscuring part of a waistline, or adding breadth at the shoulder to make the waistline appear narrower. Subtly darkening the outer edges of pants or tops with shadowing that you apply on a new layer with a soft brush at low opacity can add dimension that gives the appearance of slenderness. These techniques and tactics don't work unless you have the latitude to choose which part of a photo remains visible or to alter the image by introducing new elements. If you can't crop the image or edit your subject's wardrobe, you'll need to explore other retouching alternatives.

Version Information

Information in this article applies to Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Photoshop CS6. It may differ slightly or significantly with other versions or products.

About the Author

Elizabeth Mott has been a writer since 1983. Mott has extensive experience writing advertising copy for everything from kitchen appliances and financial services to education and tourism. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in English from Indiana State University.